San Diego atheists believe in billboards

Thursday in eastern San Diego, a mile from a church sign that reads, “The grass withers and the flowers fall but the word of our God stands forever,” a billboard will rise to promote the opposite view.

“Atheism,” it will say. “A personal relationship with reality.”

Reality? Really?

I had other questions, of course, when I learned of the billboard’s imminent arrival this week. The philosopher in me — or maybe the comic? — wanted to know if it meant seeing wasn’t believing.

I called the billboard’s local sponsor, and she called me back immediately. Turns out that’s what atheists do. Beside billboards, journalists are the best way to get their message out.

Their billboard wasn’t up Wednesday off state Route 94 west of the College Avenue exit when I went looking for a church, any church, nearby. My quest didn’t take long, and the pastor of the San Diego Reformed Presbyterian Church pulled up in his vehicle as I exited mine.

Was it chance or divine intervention? Maybe this column will help us figure that out.

Debbie Allen, coordinator of the San Diego Coalition of Reason, told me that her umbrella organization has bought a billboard only once before — for four weeks in late 2009 along Interstate 8 in La Mesa for $6,200.

“Don’t Believe in God?” it asked. “You are not alone.”

In part because of the publicity, the coalition has grown from nine groups to 18. It now boasts about 2,000 members; the county has 3.1 million residents.

“We’re hoping this will spur on another period of growth locally,” Allen said. “We would like billboards on every highway to reach everybody, but that’s beyond our budget.”

Atheists in other cities have installed a dozen or more billboards at one time to combat the bigotry some of them feel. In October, 15 went up in Portland, Ore., showing pictures of everyday people with the tag line, “This is what an atheist looks like.” Someone drew horns on one of the faces. In December, 12 billboards around Chico advertised, “Don’t believe in God? Join the club.” A week later, someone ripped the word “Don’t” from one.

San Diego’s first atheism billboard was not vandalized, though, and Allen hopes the worst thing that happens to the new one is the weed-whacking she might do herself.

For $4,000 over four weeks, the billboard will show a stack of books holding up a curtain, with a blue sky behind the curtain and in front of it. I saw the image on a computer and didn’t get it right away, either, so let me save you from scratching your head as you speed past the sign.

“I think it’s very clever,” Allen said. “Obviously, we want to get across the message that when you pull up the curtain on the universe or on reality, first of all you do so through education, science, etc., which is what the books symbolize. But on the other side, it’s just the natural world. There are no wizards or goblins or supernatural beings behind the curtain.”

As we talked, Allen acknowledged that people might not understand the image and pinpointed the word “atheism” as the billboard’s most provocative element. She had this message for anyone who considers the billboard confrontational: “I would like them to think about what is it that we’re confronting, and what we’re confronting is the assumption that there is just one way to be in this world, that there is just one right way to think in this world.”

Even atheists have different world views. Consider the billboard that went up in Times Square over Christmas, when the New Jersey-based American Atheists received more than $25,000 from a private donor to proclaim, “Keep the Merry! Dump the Myth!”

There’s clearly a divide among atheists, agnostics and humanists about how to expand their ranks and how to sow doubt about religion. Some like Allen seem to enjoy engaging in conversations. Others like David Silverman, president of American Atheists, which is helping to pay for San Diego’s billboard, prefer to try to end them.

Silverman told me that religion is “the most divisive force in the universe.”

“When you attack religion, people assume that you’re attacking the good for which religion claims, but that’s not true,” he said. “Religion deserves no respect and we don’t respect it at all. Now that does not mean we don’t respect religious people. Religious people are merely the victims of a brainwashing they receive at some time in their life that makes them think that something that is obviously impossible is actually true.”

What is that impossibility? “An invisible man in the sky,” Silverman said.

I drove east on state Route 94 into Lemon Grove and back to San Diego reflecting on this. I wondered what a pastor would make of it all.

“It’s a free country,” pastor Mark England said. “They can say and do what they want. I’m not sure what to say about it. I think it’s kind of silly.

“I didn’t know that atheists were busy propagandizing and evangelizing for themselves, for their movement,” he added. “A number of the ones that I know are quite happy just to be left alone, but, hey, it’s a battle of ideas and truth will out. If they ever want to come by and visit here, I’d be happy to talk with them.”

England wasn’t done: “I would say even atheism is functionally a religion. It’s a system of thought by which you perceive and organize all reality. I know they would probably croak to hear me say that, but honestly enough, any philosophy of life that determines right from wrong and the things that you value and helps you to make moral decisions and cope with the difficulty of life, functionally, is a religion, whether you involve God in it or not.”